Plastic pollution is ubiquitous throughout the marine environment, yet estimates of the global abundance and weight of floating plastics have lacked data, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere and remote regions. Here we report an estimate of the total number of plastic particles and their weight floating in the world’s oceans from 24 expeditions (2007–2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, coastal Australia, Bay of Bengal and the Mediterranean Sea conducting surface net tows (N5680) and visual survey transects of large plastic debris (N5891). Using an oceanographic model of floating debris dispersal calibrated by our data, and correcting for wind-driven vertical mixing, we estimate a minimum of 5.25 trillion particles weighing 268,940 tons. When comparing between four size classes, two microplastic <4.75 mm and meso- and macroplastic >4.75 mm, a tremendous loss of microplastics is observed from the sea surface compared to expected rates of fragmentation, suggesting there are mechanisms at play that remove <4.75 mm plastic particles from the ocean surface.

It is estimated that some 200,000 metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste, i.e burnt or dumped, is created by Coca-Cola every year across these six developing nations. The company's biggest plastic pollution footprint is in Mexico, where approximately 75,000 metric tons is produced per year. This is enough plastic waste to cover more than 12 football pitches a day. Coca-Cola is by far the most popular beverage brand in Mexico.

In 2019, the Philippines was the largest emitter of ocean plastics in the Asia-Pacific region, accounting for 36.38 percent of the global marine plastic pollution. India followed, contributing approximately 13 percent to ocean plastic waste worldwide.

 Mismanaged plastic waste across Asia

Asian countries and territories are responsible for over 80 percent of all global plastic waste emitted to the ocean. This is a result of waste mismanagement, attributable to lacking waste collection and processing infrastructures across several countries in the region. Recycling makes up a small share of waste disposal methods used, while open dumps are the most-employed practice in Southeast Asia. As the name suggests, open dumps are mostly uncovered, leading to a higher risk of pollution of the surrounding areas and especially leakage into rivers nearby. Rivers are a major source of marine debris, and South and Southeast Asian rivers make up the largest emitters of ocean plastics worldwide. River Pasig in the Philippines accounts for over six percent of this debris.

Impact on climate and people

Asia-Pacific is the world region most vulnerable to climate change and accompanying sea-level rise due to its many islands and low-lying coastal territories. Insufficient waste management practices such as open dumps or incineration are catalysts to global warming, as the exposure of plastic debris to sunlight and heat leads to the release of greenhouse gases. Consumers in Asia have shared their various concerns regarding plastics, including their effects on the global climate as well as ocean and marine life.

The raster geotiff files contain the numerical model outputs for weight and count density for the four size classes investigated in the study by Eriksent et al. (2014) and expressed in order of magnitude (log10 scale).Eriksen et al. 2014Plastic Pollution in the World's Oceans: More than 5 Trillion Plastic Pieces Weighing over 250,000 Tons Afloat at Seahttps://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111913

Plastics represent the vast majority of human-made debris present in the oceans. However, their characteristics, accumulation zones, and transport pathways are still poorly assessed. We characterised and estimated the concentration of marine plastics in waters around Australia using surface net tows, and inferred their potential pathways using particle-tracking models and real drifter trajectories. The 839 marine plastics recorded were predominantly small fragments (“microplastics”, median length = 2.8 mm, mean length = 4.9 mm) resulting from the breakdown of larger objects made of polyethylene and polypropylene (e.g. packaging and fishing items). Mean sea surface plastic concentration was 4256.4 pieces km-2, and after incorporating the effect of vertical wind mixing, this value increased to 8966.3 pieces km-2. These plastics appear to be associated with a wide range of ocean currents that connect the sampled sites to their international and domestic sources, including populated areas of Australia’s east coast. This study shows that plastic contamination levels in surface waters of Australia are similar to those in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Maine, but considerably lower than those found in the subtropical gyres and Mediterranean Sea. Microplastics such as the ones described here have the potential to affect organisms ranging from megafauna to small fish and zooplankton.,nettows_infoplastics_info,

Plastics in the marine environment have become a major concern because of their persistence at sea, and adverse consequences to marine life and potentially human health. Implementing mitigation strategies requires an understanding and quantification of marine plastic sources, taking spatial and temporal variability into account. Here we present a global model of plastic inputs from rivers into oceans based on waste management, population density and hydrological information. Our model is calibrated against measurements available in the literature. We estimate that between 1.15 and 2.41 million tonnes of plastic waste currently enters the ocean every year from rivers, with over 74% of emissions occurring between May and October. The top 20 polluting rivers, mostly located in Asia, account for 67% of the global total. The findings of this study provide baseline data for ocean plastic mass balance exercises, and assist in prioritizing future plastic debris monitoring and mitigation strategies.

Modelled plastic inputs into the ocean from rivers worldwide.

The compressed .zip folder is a shapefile containing 40,760 river input locations (EPSG:4326, WGS 84) with the following attributes:

i_*level*: plastic input in tonnes per year. (level=low, mid or high for lower, midpoint and upper estimates)

i_level_*month*: plastic input in tonnes per month. (level=low,mid,high; month=jan,feb,...,dec)

runoff_month: monthly averaged runoff in catchment in mm per day. (month=jan,feb,...,dec)

mpw: mismanaged plastic waste production in catchment in kg per year.

area: catchment area in square meters.

## Added .csv file with XY locations for river outfalls and attributes above ##

Plastic has become ubiquitous in human society, with about 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic produced since 1950. Out of this amount, 6.4 billion metric tons have become waste which either sits in landfills or, even worse, the natural environment. Globally, humans have produced more plastic in the last 15 years than they have in the last 50 years. Due to the rise of oil and gas, packaging has become the largest plastic market as it is often cheaper to produce virgin plastics as a petroleum product rather than recycle plastic.

Plastic and the Environment
Plastic is largely tied to the oil industry as it is both cheap and easy to convert oil into plastics, creating single-use plastics or disposable plastics. Petroleum-based plastics are not biodegradable and often get thrown into landfills. It is estimated that plastic water bottles may take up to 450 years to degrade, however, plastics do not biodegrade into natural substances but rather will continuously breakdown into smaller and smaller particles. These particles, microplastics, have been found in the water and food supply as well as in animals and humans.

This dataset consists of the data used in the paper "Impacts of Plastic Waste Management Strategies", published in environmental reviews.

Note that for the study, reviews and commentaries were excluded. The intervetion categories marked OTHER and Multiple were also excluded.

Each row in the sheet corresponds to an impact of plastic waste mitigation identified in the literature. For our analysis, on the impacts marked "YES" in column J ("FINAL") were included in the analysis.

Please email Levi Helm (lthelm@asu.edu) with any questions.

These data are made of two files. One file provides the observed data we collected and cleaned from the World Bank database. The second file provides the simulation results from the STIRPAT model we designed based on the observed data abovementioned. Our results can be summarised as follows:

Since 2015, the detrimental effects of plastic pollution have attracted media, public, and governmental attention. Considering economic growth is inevitable and a key driver of plastic contamination, it is worthwhile to analyze the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) relationship between economic development and plastic pollution. To this end, we contribute by being the first to (i) use the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and technology model (STIRPAT model) to investigate this EKC relationship; (ii) provide a comprehensive analysis of how demographic factors affect plastic pollution; and (iii) use panel model techniques to examine the drivers of plastic pollution. Our empirical results support an inverted U-shaped relationship between plastic pollution and income. They show that at current trends, global plastic pollution (that is, annual discard of inadequately managed plastic waste) is expected to grow from 52 million tons per year in 2020 to 257 million tons per year in 2050.

Focusing on the most commonly occurring consumer plastic items present in European freshwater environments, we identified and evaluated consumer-based actions with respect to their direct or indirect potential to reduce macroplastic pollution in freshwater environments. As the main end users of these items, concerned consumers are faced with a bewildering array of choices to reduce their plastics footprint, notably through recycling or using reusable items. Using a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis approach, we explored the effectiveness of 27 plastic reduction actions with respect to their feasibility, economic impacts, environmental impacts, unintended social/environmental impacts, potential scale of change and evidence of impact. Total action scores have been calculated using a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) on 27 plastic reduction actions identified though a literature review. Each of the total action scores is the weighted sum of 1-5 scores (assigned to each of ten criteria to assess the positive environmental impact of each action, based on the literature review) and % weights of each criterion to rank their relative importance. We provide two tables in csv format: 1) the % weights assigned by 15 experts to rank the relative importance of socio-economic and environmental criteria to assess plastic reduction actions; 2) the 1-5 scores assigned to each of the ten criteria in relation to each of the 27 actions; the median weights for each of the ten criteria calculated from 1); and the total action scores of each of the 27 actions calculated as weighted sum (e.g. TAS action 1: sum of ten products of % criterion weight * 1-5 scores assigned to each combination criterion - plastic reduction action).

Negotiations for a Global Treaty on plastic pollution will shape future policies on plastics production, use, and waste management. Its parties will benefit from a high-resolution baseline of waste flows and plastic emission sources to enable identification of pollution hotspots and their causes. Nationally aggregated waste management data can be distributed to smaller scale to identify generalised points of plastic accumulation and source phenomena. However, it is challenging to use this type of spatial allocation to assess the conditions under which emissions take place. To this, we develop a global macroplastic pollution emissions inventory by combining conceptual modelling of emission mechanisms with measurable activity data. We define emissions as materials that have moved from the managed or mismanaged system (controlled or contained state) to the unmanaged system (uncontrolled or uncontained state - the environment). Using machine learning and probabilistic material flow analysis..., Detailed information on how this dataset was collected and processed is available in the Supplementary Materials, associated with the publication., R studio and MSExcel were used for the analyses., # Supplementary files for A local-to-global emissions inventory of macroplastic pollution

Authors:Â

Joshua W. Cottom - J.W.Cottom@leeds.ac.uk

School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3480-3982Â

Ed Cook - E.R.Cook@leeds.ac.ukÂ

School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3902-7705

Costas Velis (correspondence) - C.Velis@leeds.ac.uk

School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1906-726X

MODEL VERSION:

Spatio-temporal plastic pollution origins and transport model (SPOT) V1.1.0-G-1223

DESCRIPTION:

Data and modelling files for SPOT V1.1.0-G-1223 as presented in the manuscript "A local-to-glob...

Plastic pollution is considered to be plastic that is discarded, disposed of, or abandoned in the environment. In an environmental context, plastics are often categorized by size, with macroplastics being larger than 5 millimetres (mm) and microplastics being less than or equal to 5 mm.

This dataset has an article on plastics that make their way into the ocean and data on plastics and other waste in the Pacific Island region.

This data set is a prototype for a global marine litter baseline. It combines three citizen science projects and organizes the data to be interpretable as one data set. This data set is sourced from the European Environmental Agency's Marine Litter Watch Program (MLW), The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project's accumulation report (MDMAP), and Ocean Conservancy's International Coastal Clean-Up (ICC) dataset. This data set contains the comprehensive results of a three-step standardization process:1) Three CSIRO - inspired litter classification schemes were developed for three datasets from organizations who help organize events and maintain detailed records of cleanup activities. These datasets were the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project (MDMAP), Ocean's Conservancy's International Coastal Clean Up (ICC) dataset , and the European Environmental Agencies Marine Litter Watch (MLW) dataset. 2) Those re-classification schemes were applied to a 4 year subset containing data from cleanup events spanning Jan 1, 2015 through Dec 31, 2018. Once this schema was applied those datasets were combined to create a global perspective of Plastic Pollution.3) The combined data set was then brought into ArcGIS and geocoded using the coordinates created for each event. Standard country codes were assigned to approximately 90% of these events using a GIS layer of country boundaries. This layer contains all the events that were successfully geocoded to a country. Please access the meta-data dictionary for this data set here.Note: The geocoding process removed missing coordinates, errant coordinates, and likely also removed some correct coordinates from the collection of source data. A 3500-meter buffer was applied to each event to account for low tides, sandbars, and the detailed nature of coastal boundaries to increase the likelihood that a given event was assigned to a country.

marine material spillage international oceans

This statistic shows the plastic pollution entering the Great Lakes annually in North America based on a study published in 2016. The annual amount of plastic that enters Lake Michigan amounted to approximately 5,000 metric tons as of this time.

Marine litter is a growing global problem that impacts biodiversity and human societies alike. South-east Asis suffers significant impacts due to high biodiversity, dense human populations, and larger volumes of plastics entering the marine environment, primarily through rivers. Call Number: [EL]Physical Description: 20 p.

Global plastic waste generation increased seven-fold between 1980 and 2019, reaching 353 million metric tons in the latter year. Packaging was consistently the main source of plastic waste during this period, reaching 142 million metric tons in 2019. Plastic waste is a major environmental issue around the world, with huge quantities leaking into marine ecosystems.

Analysis of ‘Global Plastic Pollution’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/sohamgade/plastic-datasets on 28 January 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

More and more plastic is being generated every year and more of which is getting dumped into the ocean or is mishandled.

The focus of this study was to understand how much plastic a country produces over a year's period and how much of that plastic is mismanaged.

Content

Datasets contains: - Global plastic production from year 1950 to 2015. - Along with this, it contains waste generated per person (per day/kg) & mismanaged waste per person (per day/kg) for the year 2010.

Acknowledgements

This dataset was gathered from Our World in Data from their article Plastic Pollution.

Inspiration

When are we going to be aware of the amount of plastic that we use?

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

The Government of Canada undertook a thorough scientific review of the potential impacts of plastic pollution on human health and the environment.